Context, curriculum and professional knowledge

Abstract

This article provides a historical overview of how the process of curriculum change has evolved over the past 40 years. The intention is to explore how patterns of power and control have changed their configuration during different historical periods. The historical investigation of curriculum change shows a progressive movement away from the definition of curriculum by the deliberation and discussion of issues and content by professional groups. The professional groups – teachers and scholars – have been replaced by a range of political and commercial interest groups. In the conclusion some of the likely consequences of these changes are explored, particularly with regard to their impact on children’s education.

Keywords:

• curriculum
• social change
• knowledge and control

Notes

¹ John Meyer, David Kamens and Aaron Benavot, School Knowledge for the Masses (London and Washington, DC: Falmer Press, 1992).

² Ivor F. Goodson and Sverker Lindblad, eds., Professional Knowledge and Educational Restructuring in Europe (Rotterdam, Boston and Taipei: Sense, 2010).

³ David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

⁴ Ivor F. Goodson, The Making of Curriculum: Collected Essays, 2nd ed. (London, New York and Philadelphia: Falmer Press, 1995).

⁵ Joseph Ben-David and Randall Collins, ‘Social Factors in the Origins of a New Science: The Case of Psychology’, American Sociological Review 31, no. 4 (August 1966): 451–65.

⁶ Goodson, The Making of Curriculum, 193–4.

⁷ Ivor F. Goodson, ‘The Educational Researcher as a Public Intellectual’, British Educational Research Journal 25, no. 3 (1999): 277–297.

⁸ Goodson, The Making of Curriculum; Ivor F. Goodson, Professional Knowledge, Professional Lives: Studies in Education and Change (Maidenhead and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2003).

⁹ Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratiev, The Long Wave Cycle, trans. Guy Daniels (New York: Richardson & Snyder, 1984).

¹⁰ Ivor F. Goodson, ‘Social Histories of Educational Change’, Journal of Educational Change 2, no. 1 (2001): 45–63.

¹¹ Rosa M. Torres, One Decade of Education for All: The Challenge Ahead [Una Decada de Educacion para Todos: la tasrea pendiente]. (Montevideo: FUM-TEP; Madrid: Editorial Popular; Caracas: Editorial Laboratorio Educativo; Buenos Aires: IIPE UNESCO; Porto Alegre: Artmed Editoria, 2000).

¹² Jane Kenway, Economising Education: The Post-Fordist Directions (Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University Press, 1993); Geoff Whitty, ‘Marketization, the State, and the Re-formation of the Teaching Profession’, in Education: Culture, Economy, Society, ed. Albert H Halsey, Hugh Lauder, Phillip Brown and Amy Stuart Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 299–310; Heather J. Robertson, No More Teachers, No More Books: the Commercialization of Canada’s Schools (Toronto, Ontario: McClelland & Stewart, 1998).

¹³ William A. Reid, ‘Curricular Topics as Institutional Categories: Implications for Theory and Research in the History and Sociology of School Subjects’, in Defining the Curriculum: Histories and Ethnographies, ed. Ivor F Goodson and Stephen J Ball (London and Philadelphia: Falmer Press 1984), 67–75.

¹⁴ Reid, ‘Curricular Topics as Institutional Categories’, 68.

¹⁵ Ian Menter and others, Work and Identity in the Primary School: A Post-Fordist Analysis (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1997).

¹⁶ Andy Hargreaves, Lorna Earl, Shawn Moore and Susan Manning, Learning to Change: Teaching Beyond Subjects and Standards (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001).

¹⁷ Ibid., 51–2.

¹⁸ Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (London and New York: Allen Lane, 2012).

¹⁹ Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London and New York: Verso, 2013).

²⁰ David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (London: Allen Lane, 2013).

²¹ Richard J. Evans, ‘The Mr Men Game’, New Statesman, May 17–23, 2013, 29.

²² Evans, ‘The Mr Men Game’, 29.

²³ http://auroraacademies.org/, accessed March 24, 2014.

²⁴ Jamie Doward, ‘Academy Pays £100,000 for U.S. Curriculum’, Observer, May 19, 2013, 11.

²⁵ Doward, ‘Academy Pays £100,000 for U.S. Curriculum’.